\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
– F. Scott Fitzgerald,\u00c2\u00a0The Beautiful and the Damned<\/em><\/p>\n Earlier this week, I was perusing the National Public Radio website when I saw an interview with author Olivia Laing titled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Mythos of the Boozing Writer.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Laing talked to an interviewer about her new book, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTrip to Echo Spring,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 which explores the alcoholism of a selection of famous, beloved American writers.<\/p>\n It hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t occurred to me that the stereotype of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcboozing writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 was surrounded by mythology \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in fact, I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even questioned that it was true. The alcoholism of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to me a characteristic both inextricable from their personas and intertwined with the substance of most of their work.<\/p>\n Although the stereotype of the heavy-drinking writer is based in reality \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a huge amount of beloved American writers have been alcoholics, including 4 of the 6 Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Laing argues that many famous alcoholic writers, worked so hard to establish a romanticized idea of the boozing writer mostly in order to cover up the darker realities of their own alcoholism. Laing suggests in her interview that Hemingway in particular was responsible glamorizing the idea of the heavy-drinking writer, creating a romanticized account of alcoholism that she says is in some ways \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcaddicting in itself.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n In her book, Laing focuses specifically on Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, Scott F. Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all writers who have produced some of the most beautiful and beloved literature of all time, and all virulent alcoholics. Although these famous writers rarely actually wrote drunk, they certainly thought of alcohol as an intrinsic part of the creative process, and often wrote about alcoholism. Here, the difference between these writers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 accounts of their alcohol consumption and the realities of their alcohol abuse becomes a kind of sore spot for many who love their work \u00e2\u20ac\u201c if we often engage with the works of these greats with the assumption that their descriptive genius can provide us with penetrating truths, unfogged by pettiness or subterfuge, are we being cheated by the accidental artifice of an active alcoholic\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s take on alcoholism?<\/p>\n Lewis Hyde\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s essay \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAlcohol and Poetry,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 which specifically investigates the effects of alcoholism on the works of John Berryman, was one of the first explorations of the myth of the creative alcoholic. In response to critics who fear that a prejudice against alcoholic authors could in some way deprive us of a beloved literary canon, Hyde has declared that he \u00e2\u20ac\u0153would shudder to think of a culture that would canonize these voices without marking where they fail us.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n In Hyde\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s opinion, the active alcoholic cannot write with veracity about alcoholism. These writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s twisted takes on alcoholism stand as accidents, artistic failures in their legacy. But many alcoholic writers have also given us tragically discerning accounts of alcohol abuse. Laing argues that the writers she researches often leave out the darker side of alcoholism, quantified in lost jobs, destroyed relationships and damaged families. But not all of these writers shy away from this side of alcoholism \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTender is the Night,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 we watch Dick Diver deteriorate as his drinking problem becomes increasingly destructive; John Cheever\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s famous short story \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Swimmer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 describes the tragedy of a declining alcoholic over the course of an increasingly surreal afternoon.<\/p>\n With the emergence of new scientific research, Alcoholics Anonymous, and 12 step programs, writers no longer control the broader cultural narrative on alcoholism. However, the mythology they have created still seems to control the narrative on alcoholism in creative communities. How significant is it that the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgreat writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is still usually pictured with a drink in hand? Of all of the points that Laing made in her interview, this one stuck with me: the alcoholism of great writers was less an effect of a riotous, inspired existence and more a symptom of deep, untreated depression. This may be the true failure of the intellectual community\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s embrace of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmythos of the boozing writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it glamorizes, and in doing so dismisses, human suffering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d – F. Scott Fitzgerald,\u00c2\u00a0The Beautiful and the Damned Earlier this week, I was perusing the National Public Radio website when I saw an interview with author Olivia Laing titled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Mythos of the Boozing Writer.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Laing talked to an interviewer about her new book, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcTrip to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/205"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4534"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4537,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4534\/revisions\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}